Portable build solution

[Albert Chin]

Not reading the kde-devel list much, I just found out about the new
build system based on SCons. We've built KDE on Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64
UNIX, IRIX, and Redhat Linux (took a stab at AIX as well but, while we
had some of it compiled, it didn't work). I'm hoping the new build
system will be portable to these systems. All I know about bksys I've
read at:
  http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php?content=19243
  http://dot.kde.org/1126452494/

My main concern is what will happen to libtool. Will the new build
system be responsible for creating shared libraries?
  1. On HP-UX, will it use '.sl' rather than '.so' for the library
     extension suffix?
  2. On AIX, will it create an export list and pass
     -bE:[export list file] to the compiler to create the shared
     library (on AIX, gcc -shared isn't good enough to create a
     shared library)?
  3. The Tru64 UNIX and IRIX C++ compilers, as of KDE 3.3.2, were
     almost good enough to build KDE natively. Will the native
     C++ compiler be supported?
  4. Will CC/CXX/CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS/LDFLAGS be supported (it is often
     necessary to set LDFLAGS to the runtime path of 3rd-party
     libraries?
  5. Will dlopen() be used to load shared libraries dynamically
     rather than libtool's ltdl()?

-- 
albert chin (china at thewrittenword.com)